Personalized medical plans aiming to limit metastasis are difficult to develop. The current state of the art requires the expansion of human cancers in immunodeficient mice before the cancers can be subjected to drug screenings. It is known that metastatic subpopulations of cancer cells have heighted motility which is linked to aggressiveness and invasiveness of the cancer. The ability to identify such a subpopulation of cells in a tumor of a patient would be useful in classifying the aggressiveness or metastatic potential of the cancer in the subject, and would also be useful in identifying optimal courses of treatment and determining whether the treatment was effective.
There currently exists no means for determining the motility of a cell or subpopulation of cells in a sample which is low cost, high throughput, and easy to operate.